In recent years, in the field of electronic devices, products have become compact, light weight, and multifunction. Printed board units for forming the electronic devices have also become highly integrated. These facts have increased the number of parts to be mounted, reduced the size of each part, and complicated the entire process. It is difficult, therefore, to manually assemble the parts. To cope with this, factories have been introducing many automatic parts inserters and mounters. Due to increasing personnel expenses in the factories, there is a need of efficiently operating the introduced expensive equipment with as little manual intervention as possible. Since the needs of customers are diverse and since life cycles of some goods are short, the factories are required to produce many kinds of articles in small quantities within short delivery periods. These factors prevents the unmanned and efficient operation of the factories.
Conventionally, various attempts have been made to provide various apparatus disposed in a production line for each kind of product to realize unmanned and efficient operation. No system, however, has yet been realized that provides unmanned and efficient operation or the line as a whole and for many kinds of products.